By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
The Internet has a way of making you forget that you like things. Recently I examined and analyzed The Comics Industry for an online roundtable, and it was interesting and fun, but afterwards I found myself wondering why I was so into comics in the first place. And I couldn't remember—at least until I glanced at a copy of Makoto Kobayashi's manga
Club 9, about a curvy farmgirl who becomes the toast of the high-rolling Ginza district of Tokyo as the newest girl at a swanky hostess club. (She has to take the job so she can afford to move out of her college dorm room because it's haunted by a nerdy ghost who whines incessantly about having died a virgin, but it's okay because the hostess club attracts fascinating men like baseball stars and Makoto Kobayashi himself…but I'm losing the thread here.) And I was all,
Oh yeah. That's why.
With this in mind, I asked a wide range of comics professionals this question:
What comic do you read to be happy?
Tom Hart, comics instructor and creator of Hutch Owen
Peaunts, of course.
Assuming you mean return-to-the-womb-simplicity kind of happy.
Adolescent sort of happy, it'd be Glenn Dakin's
ABE.
Other kinds of happy:
Overjoyed at merging of craft and humanity:
Locas II
Thrilled by storytelling deftness and lightness:
Joann Sfar
A sort of happiness at traversing a path through the world: my old mini-comics
Sheer manic joy:
Enomoto, New Elements that Shake the World
Small community sort of joy: any comics by my friends
Glee and erotica:
Bode's Deadbone Erotica
Wordplay and perfect place joy:
Pogo
Joy that the world is bigger and weirder than I can figure out: believe it or not,
Popeye
Carl Horn, Dark Horse manga editor
Happiness is such a complicated word, isn't it? I guess my all-time answer would be
Peanuts, and my right-now answer would be
Moyasimon.
Noah Berlatsky, comics critic
I know that all the critics say it's supposed to be a tortured confessional trudge through Charles Schulz's angst-filled soul, but for me
Peanuts is about the most joyful comic I can think of. It's not just the moments of high spirits, like Snoopy's happy dance, but the joy Schulz takes in all aspects of his craft, from the fluid motion lines to the goofy words like Petaluma and amblyopia. Even the moments of melancholy and neurosis are so filled with imaginative verve that it's hard for me to imagine anyone reading
Peanuts and feeling sad.
Chris Onstad, creator of Achewood
Farley Katz and Zack Kanin in
The New Yorker.
William George, creator of Dimes for Nickels
These two:
Yotsuba&! and
Saint Young Men.
Mari Naomi, creator of Estrus
I'm not sure that any one comic in particular gives me the happies (almost all of them do), but lately I've been reading Roberta Gregory's
True Cat Toons (
truecattoons.com) whenever I want a smile on my face.
Walden Wong, DC and Marvel inker
I read different comics in waves. When I'm done with a bunch, I move on to something else. There's no set wavelength. A few months ago, I was reading everything Terry Moore...
Strangers in Paradise as well as his newer title,
ECHO. Before that, I was reading the whole
Invincible series by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker. Now, I'm reading everything Gene Luen Yang...
American Born Chinese,
The Eternal Smile, and
Animal Crackers.
I also buy a lot of regular-sized comics.
Glamourpuss, by Dave Sim, is a comic I'm reading. The writings in that book had nothing to do with art sometimes. Just random words and random drawing. Weird, yet I still read it. Sometimes I'll loose track of what Dave is writing about. When that happens, I'll veer toward studying his art, then back to reading. Anyhoo, with regular comics, the majority of the time, I just look at pictures for the artwork. I may read a few issues here and there, but nothing compares to graphic novels where everything is collected and organized.
Gene Yang, creator of American Born Chinese:
Dang! by Martin Cendreda.
Mike Lynch, magazine cartoonist
To make me happy, 3 things come to mind. I read—
Yotsuba
and
Little Lulu
—and I like looking at (but seldom read) covers to those old DC 100 Page Super Spectaculars I bought when I was a kid.
Next: Part Two…Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
